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Logan's Memory & his history with Sabretooth.

I've been wondering about this, and I'm sure it's a complicated subject. When was it first referenced that Logan only had part of his memory? I don't believe it was in Giant-Size X-Men #1? When it was first referenced, how much could he remember?

I just read Wolverine Vol. 2 #10 on Marvel Unlimited because it was the first appearance of Silver Fox, but I was so confused. I'm not sure how much of a history with Sabretooth he's supposed to have at that point. It appears, though, that even at this point Logan has memories of the late 1800s or early 1900s.

I've been wondering about this, and I'm sure it's a complicated subject. When was it first referenced that Logan only had part of his memory? I don't believe it was in Giant-Size X-Men #1? When it was first referenced, how much could he remember?

That's actually a really good question. His past was always pretty mysterious, going back to his Claremont/Byrne X-Men days, but I don't think there was ever any indication that he had memory losses until his first ongoing series (1988 run). Even, then, I don't think it showed up until after Claremont had left the title. (See below)

I just read Wolverine Vol. 2 #10 on Marvel Unlimited because it was the first appearance of Silver Fox, but I was so confused. I'm not sure how much of a history with Sabretooth he's supposed to have at that point. It appears, though, that even at this point Logan has memories of the late 1800s or early 1900s.

So, to this point and in reference to my above note, Wolverine #10, by Claremont ('88 series) was where Silver Fox was first introduced. At this point, Claremont had already worked Sabretooth into Wolverine's backstory in X-Men, so this story was really just fleshing that out. That said, there is absolutely no indication in this storyline that Wolverine is suffering from any kind of memory loss. Instead, he appears to just be flashing back to a time when he lived in the Canadian woods with his native american lover and his (already old) rival Sabretooth killed her on his birthday. This was Claremont fleshing out the ongoing "annual birthday fight" that he had already established as part of the Sabes/Logan history (ie, Creed always shows up and nearly kills Logan on his birthday. Logan's healing factor wasn't yet out of control and Creed was the one foe that Logan truly feared because he was more deadly even than the man who is "the best he is at what he does.")

Side note: This story does seem to hint that Wolverine and Creed are both much older than they seemed to be. Claremont also hinted at this in his early Wolverine ('88) stories by having a picture of Logan with a very young Chang (an employee of Landau, Luckman, and Lake) in Madripoor.

There were hints at possible memory gaps before this: some of the retellings of the Wolverine/Heather and Mac Hudson stories showed him as very feral after his escape from Weapon X, and Barry Windsor-Smith's Weapon X series seemed to show that Logan had a gap in his memory about the experimentation done on him, but nothing quite as extensive- and nothing indicating memories being rewritten that I know of.

I think it was probably Larry Hama who took all of this backstory to its (possibly inevitable?) conclusion of memory tampering. Hama likes to base a lot of his stories on real world military and military intelligence themes (such as CIA mind control experiments and the like). He either introduced the memory rewrites or just fleshed them out more than anyone else; I'd guess the former, but I'm not sure. I know that Claremont also was writing Logan memory loss stories at or around the same time on X-Men, and both men used some of the same (or similar) sequences, such as Logan/Creed in Team X.

In any event, even when the memory tampering storyline was going full bore, it was always only small chunks and pieces here and there, mostly centered around his Team X time that may or may not have been real. Not that it didn't have Logan questioning everything (as one would), but pretty much anything before his Weapon X/Team X days and after his original Hulk appearance can be pretty well relied upon to be real memories.